All the Way to China by Maria Rouphail

$19.99

 

“In Maria Rouphail’s All the Way to China, imagination serves memory in variations of gratitude, liveliness, and wonder.”

–Shelby Stephenson was poet laureate of North Carolina from 2015 to 2018.  His recent books are More and Shelby’s Lady:  The Hog Poems.

 

“All the Way to China is a book about rediscovering one’s roots. It’s about a mother’s tough love and the instilling of drive in her daughter to persevere, to move on, to Live. Through these poems, Maria Rouphail invites us into her world and how it was shaped. A powerful, well-crafted collection. Highly recommended.”

–M. Scott Douglass, Publisher/Managing Editor, Main Street Rag Publishing Company

 

“Maria Rouphail’s eye is unflinching yet her voice is forgiving as she recalls the lyric memories of a family’s history of trauma. From the title poem that takes the reader to “a dark river hauling out of a glacier in Tibet, / all dragon sheen and muscle moving” to “an orange sky” over LA where “freeways writhe like ropes of fire,” Maria Rouphail explores the landscapes of longing and loss between mothers and daughters. The poems are like trees that bloom and burn with each turn of the page.

–Beth Copeland, author of Blue Honey, recipient of the 2017 Dogfish Head Poetry Prize.

 

“What a beautiful and powerful book! I’ve read All the Way to China twice and found new things in it each time. Throughout these poems you’ll find grief and anger melded with beauty, and the understanding that even when we are broken, we can be made whole, our scars still in evidence, seamed with gold.”

 —Mimi Herman, North Carolina Piedmont Laureate (2017) and author of A Field Guide to Human Emotions (Finishing Line Press, 2021).

 

 

 

 

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Description

All the Way to China

by Maria Rouphail

$19.99, Full-length, paper

978-1-64662-963-3

All the Way to China is Maria Rouphail’s third poetry collection, and her second full-length manuscript. The title references childhood play in the backyard soil and her mother’s encouragement to “dig deep, dig all the way to China.” Rouphail explores family memory, an intense mother-daughter relationship, childbirth, and issues of social and interpersonal justice. Born in the Bronx, NY in 1948, Rouphail is Latina, her father having been born in Guanabacoa, Cuba in 1910. Having lived in New York and New Jersey, came of age in Miami and the South in the last decade of “official” Jim Crow. She has lived in Chicago, and now resides in Raleigh, NC.

Maria Rouphail is Senior Lecturer Emerita from North Carolina State University, where she taught courses in World Literature and where she also served as an academic adviser to the English major.  She is Poetry Editor of Main Street Rag. She has published two collections: Apertures (Finishing Line Press, New Women’s Voices) and Second Skin (Main Street Rag).  Her third collection, All the Way to China, was a 2020 finalist in both the University of Wisconsin Brittingham Poetry and the Blue Light Press competitions.  She lives in Raleigh.

 

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